Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Buster Keaton and Edward Sedgwick | The Cameraman

Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman is an absolutely splendid comedy that also saw the
beginning of his decline. The move to MGM, with its film factory-like
techniques, eventually did away with Keaton’s improvisatory methods, and
demanded even more formulaic comedic plots.

Yet this film has a wide range of quite
innovative scenes and techniques, including a supposedly disastrous movie made
by the former tintype portrait cameraman as his first film which reminds one of
the work of Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov, whose Man with a Camera appeared one year later. In another scene, Keaton
plays with somewhat homoerotic visions as his character is forced in a small
changing room with a large man, with whom he must struggle in order to put on
his bathing suit; ultimately the two appear in each other’s swimming gear.

The longest film-scene, a gangland battle
in Chinatown, was ordered up by studio head, Irving Thalberg, much to Keaton’s
distress, but it’s still wonderful filmmaking, and Keaton even was able to mock
the shoot by placing a small monkey on his back throughout.

The heroine this time around, Sally (Marceline
Day), is a far more independent and capable woman than the simpering Southerner
in his The General of a couple of
years earlier. And even the more standard routine comedic skits, such as the
scene in which he is forced to sit in the rumble seat, while the man trying to
steal away his lover, Sally, drives away with the heroine at his side. As
critic Donald Egan notes, it is clear, given the sudden rainy downpour that he
must endure, that the writers of Singin’
in the Rain had seen this film.

Keaton is even able to mock studio
executives further by allowing the money to switch reels, losing him, at first,
any possibility of winning over Sally, but finally vindicating his talent and
his lover for her; when the reel is rediscovered it also revealed that it was
he, and not his enemy, Harold Stagg (Harold Goodwin) who saved Sally’s life. In
short, The Cameraman is so much fun,
in part, because Keaton, although now drinking more heavily and getting a bit
too old to play the naïve innocent, appears to be willing to let the audience
in on the jokes. For even is double-exposed and apparently under-lit images are
so much better, to my taste, than almost any of Chaplin’s carefully composed
and over-rehearsed shots.

Even when it appears that Keaton has
lost the girl, and he walks off as a kind of Chaplinesqe figure, we think of
him as a bigger man than the Little Tramp. And Keaton’s true beauty comes
through at all moments. We side with him not simply because he is an ordinary
man prone to dozens of daily pitfalls, but for the fact that he truly is a kind
of matinee idol underneath who, despite all the handsome boys that swarm around
Sally, she truly deserves—something I believe both he and the listed director, Edward
Sedgwick, were deeply aware of. There is always a kind of secret sexual energy
behind Keaton’s best performances, even when he plays an absolute innocent. If
nothing else The Cameraman truly
reveals that if Chaplin was cute, and Harold Lloyd a kind of likeable nerd,
Keaton, behind his constant pratfalls, was a truly beautiful being. Even a
monkey could recognize that.

Unfortunately, this film would be his
last great work, with MGM, a company change that he described the worst
decision of his life, ultimately draining all Keaton’s brilliant comedic
subtlety.